Not quite on-message

May 5, 2004

In the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly (not yet online), Geoffrey Wheatcroft casts Tony Blair as a tragic figure, and says something that is strangly missing from the reporting of the Blair premiership here in the UK:

And yet by an absurd paradox, even though the members of Blair’s inner court are rightly associated with media manipulation, they have been very bad at it. For all [Alistair] Campbell’s reputation as a master of the black arts of spinning and news management, his record was a long serise of presentational disasters and news-management foul-ups.</p>
Yup. So why do so many people still seem to believe that New Labour are the masters of spin?